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Hands On With Windows 8 Release Preview: It's All About the Apps

Microsoft is updating the Windows 8 Mail, Calendar and People apps to make them more productive. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

Windows users are one step closer to getting a major system facelift – and if today's release of Microsoft's latest OS build tells us anything, it's that the company is putting the system's strongest focus on home-grown software.

We've already spent a lot of quality time with Microsoft's Windows 8 "Consumer Preview", which was released last February, but today the company made its near-final Windows 8 "Release Preview" available to the public.

The Release Preview comes a bit earlier than originally announced, but there's no shortage of new and improved features, most of which focus on lean-and-mean Metro apps. Just don't expect anything astonishingly different in terms of system architecture, as the majority of changes in this latest Windows 8 iteration center around software additions and performance improvements.

While this is the last public preview before Windows 8's final release (anticipated to arrive in October), that doesn't mean the new build is completely bug-free. I've spent the last day and a half with the Release Preview – more technically termed build 8400 – on a Samsung Series 9 ultrabook provided by Microsoft. The new build works a lot smoother than the Consumer Preview, and there's much to look forward to. But the Windows 8 team also has quite a bit of work ahead of it.

It's All About the Apps
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In our hands-on of Microsoft's Consumer Preview, we declared that your familiar Windows desktop is all but dead. In the changes we've seen in the Release Preview, this still holds true. Microsoft is focused on improving and deepening the Metro experience, where the desktop is only a portion – or even an afterthought, for some users – of a larger, app-based system.

Right on the Start screen, you'll see the new build's most noticeable updates: Three new apps – Sports, Travel and News – are pinned directly on the screen, and come built into the OS. Each of the apps implements great Metro design, but caters to a very specific purpose that might not appeal to every user. Still, they're all slick and highlight how much Microsoft wants its PC experience to more closely resemble an app-based mobile experience.

The News app aggregates the latest news stories in a way that's reminiscent of Flipboard or Zite. But according to Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience, it goes much deeper than that. A "Trends" section will show news stories that are trending across the Internet, a feature that's powered by Microsoft's Bing engine.

Because Bing has agreements with Twitter and Facebook – the world's two biggest news-sharing social networks – the News app can pull what people are sharing across search, Facebook and Twitter, and present more accurate results for trending content. There's also a "My News" section, where you can choose to pull news on very specific topics, such as ultrabooks or The Bachelorette.

"It's different than a Zite or a Flipboard, where you're getting a few articles that are being editorially put there, or put there by a small group of users," Harris told Wired. "You have to look across the entire social graph to build this."

TKTK Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

The new Sports app is a dedicated hub for the latest news, schedules, and team and player stats. The app comes pre-loaded with information silos for a number of sports leagues, including the MLB, NFL, NBA, and even the NHL and Premier League (the top soccer league in the U.K.). The Travel app provides information on travel destinations, and helps users book hotel rooms and flights, view panoramas from various locales, and read articles on travel topics.

The new apps are very easy, and even fun, to use – at least when they work. Harris made clear that News, Sports and Travel are still in beta. "All of them are in the same state that Mail and Calendar were in the previous version," he said. This was clearly evident during testing: The News and Travel apps crashed on several occasions until they just conked out, and no longer opened for me.

For Microsoft, however, the apps in their current form are less about functionality, and more about, well, proof-of-concept: "This is just an example of a personalized Metro-style app that's unlike what you have on any other platform," Harris said.

Beyond the three new apps, other apps we've already seen in the Consumer Preview – such as Mail, Calendar, Photos and Internet Explorer – have received noticeable updates. Mail has a new three-pane view that enables easier navigation when using the OS with two thumbs in tablet mode. Calendar has received improved week and month views. And Photos now works a lot faster, and can tap into information from other apps.

For example, when you're in the Photos app, you can access images from your local drive as well as other apps you have on your Windows 8 PC. This means SkyDrive, Facebook, Flickr and other connected Windows 8 devices are all direct sources of gallery navigation. And while I wasn't able to install third-party apps onto our test laptop, I did get to see a demo of how Photos can speak to non-native apps, like Photobucket.

"The cool thing about Windows 8 is the way apps work together to complete scenarios," Harris said. "I liken this to the way that there was originally the web and then there's Web 2.0. In the original web, every website was a silo. Then Web 2.0 comes and says, 'Well, actually, websites can start to talk to one another.' Windows 8 is the glue that binds any two apps together for a whole bunch of scenarios."

Harris' vision is all fine and dandy, but one of the new build's most significant new features actually arrives via a very familiar app: Internet Explorer for Metro now supports Flash directly. Harris says it's not a plug-in, but rather a native part of the Internet Explorer engine, and shouldn't be such a resource hog as a result.

The upshot: You'll be able to get as much Hulu video as you want on a Windows 8 tablet – even on Windows RT, the ARM-based Windows 8 tablet platform.

"We've taken Flash and integrated it into the rendering engine of IE. We've done the work to basically make Flash touchable, make it have great battery life, and to take out all of the bad parts of having plug-ins," Harris said.

Multitasking
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The Windows 8 Release Preview smooths out the Metro multitasking experience in Snap View, a split-screen view that lets you have two Metro apps open at once. The screen is split so that one app appears smaller on the right side, and another takes up the majority of the display. This allows for serious multitasking – a feature that's always been essential to the Windows desktop experience, but never a big part of Windows Metro functionality.

For example, you can have a video playing in the main section of the screen, and a Twitter app on the right side to tweet as you watch your favorite TV show. Or you can be reading the news in the main hub, and keeping an eye on your e-mail on the right side. All of the Windows 8 built-in apps actually work in a smaller screen view, and it's a surprisingly elegant U.I. to view and navigate.

As someone who multitasks a lot – maybe a bit too much – I really appreciated being able to see this feature in full-on action. It's certainly not the biggest or most dramatic Windows 8 feature, but it's one that a lot of people will certainly use.

A team from Cornell University's engineering department prepares their homegrown drone for a 2012 competition in Maryland. The domestic drone industry is leaning on the FAA to relax regulations on U.S. drone flights. Photo: Cornell.edu

Trackpad Multitouch Magic
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Ever since Microsoft introduced Windows 8, the conversation has focused on the operating system's role on touch-based devices – tablets, notebooks and all-in-one PC with touchscreens. But most people's first experiences with Windows 8 won't be on new devices. They'll be migrating from an older version of Windows on conventional, non-touch PCs.

With this in mind, Microsoft loaned us a non-touchscreen notebook so that we could test the new system's multitouch gestures on a conventional touchpad.

So how did it work? Well, to premise, multitouch navigation is totally wonky in its current state. But Microsoft assures us that once we get the hang of the system's multitouch trackpad gestures, we'll always want to use them when a touch-sensitive screen isn't available. "What we've tried to do is take the most important part of touch experience and move it into indirect touch," Harris said.

On a tablet, you swipe from the right to view Metro's Charms menu. You swipe left to switch through apps. You pinch for semantic zoom, and swipe in whatever direction you want to scroll through a page or screen. All of the same gestures apply to touchpad navigation, albeit on a smaller physical scale.

During real-world use, the first thing I noticed was the strangeness of reverse scrolling – when you move your fingers up on the trackpad, the page you're viewing onscreen moves down. It's an issue that was debated furiously by Mac users when OS X Lion was released. You won't be able to turn off (or flip) reverse-scrolling in the Release Preview build, so get used to it for now.

Technically, you're supposed to be able to use two-finger scrolling vertically and horizontally. Horizontal scrolling still needs some work, but again, we weren't using the system's final build. Thankfully, the other gestures are working pretty well, even in this beta iteration. When you swipe one finger from right to left, the Charms menu quickly appears. Swipe one finger from left to right, and you'll quickly cycle through open apps. And pinch-to-zoom works just fine.

"The way that we think about the desktop is as this wonderful additional app that you have on your PC," Harris said. "It's not something that we shy away from at all. We love the desktop. We think it works really well with Metro. We think it's a huge part of a complete Windows PC."

In a nutshell, that says it all. The desktop, as we know it, is dead. Now it functions as an app within Windows 8, just as Mail and News is an app. But, of course, the desktop is Windows' most powerful app, and in that sense, it has a very meaningful place in Windows 8.

While Windows 7 fans are upset they can't launch directly into the Windows 8 desktop, Metro supporters are confused about why the desktop remains without full-fledged Metro styling. For what it's worth, Microsoft did recently announce that it's ditching translucent window borders on the desktop for more a more flat, Metro look.

But Microsoft isn't worried about criticism on either side.

"There's a lot of semantic arguments on the web right now, like can people handle two interfaces?" Harris said. "Every app is its own interface, every website is its own interface. There's not a single person in the world who will come here and click on the desktop app and be like 'Oh my god, I don't know what this is, what am I supposed to do?' Everyone knows how to use this."

And in this respect, Microsoft is right. People should be able to handle both a Metro and desktop interface in a single PC system. In my time using the Release Preview on a non-touchscreen laptop, I actually enjoyed the dual experience – bugs notwithstanding – especially with the multitasking split-view feature. And I imagine the experience will only get better as Windows 8 is polished further.

In the end, we can all get what we want in Windows 8. Desktop diehards can still opt to spend all of their time in the desktop app (though I don't recommend it). And those who want Metro through and through can unpin the desktop from their Start Screens to forget the past.